He Almost Didn’t Get Her Number

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CreditKen Kienow

By Nina Reyes

July 13, 2014

Portia Dolores Pedro and Dr. Adeyemi Olusola Adeniyi Ogunkoya are to be married Sunday in Kenwood, Calif. Peter J. Bakarich, who became a Universal Life minister for the ceremony, is to officiate at the Kenwood Inn and Spa.

Ms. Pedro, 34, will keep her name. She is a fellow for public interest and constitutional law at Gibbons, the Newark law firm, and was a clerk for Judge Greenaway in 2010-11. In August, she is to begin studying for a doctoral degree in law at Yale. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, and received a law degree from Harvard.

She is a daughter of Alese A. Pedro and Donald M. Pedro Jr. of Pasadena, Calif. The bride’s father is a lead automotive technician for the Los Angeles vehicle maintenance facility of the United States Postal Service. Until May, her mother was an instructor at a program of Jewish Vocational Services in Los Angeles that offers free training and job-placement assistance for careers in banking.

Dr. Ogunkoya, 35, is in the internship year of an anesthesiology residency at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, and was until September an analyst of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies at Cantor Fitzgerald, the New York financial services company. He graduated from Johns Hopkins and received both a medical degree and an M.B.A. from Columbia.

He is a son of Kofo A. Ogunkoya and Dr. Adeniyi A. Ogunkoya of Warren, N.J. The groom’s mother, a retired pharmacist, owned three New Jersey pharmacies in Orange, East Orange and Newark. His father, an internist, specializes in allergy and immunology and has a private practice in Irvington, N.J.

The couple met in 2011 at a double birthday party for 25-year-olds that neither knew particularly well. They felt a little mature for the gathering, and Ms. Pedro felt a bit underdressed in a frock her godmother gave her.

“It was not bright, not shiny, not low cut, not short; and he came up and complimented my dress,” she said.

Dr. Ogunkoya said, “She was glowing in that dress.”

The talk between them soon turned to their ages. He asked her when she had graduated from college, and she replied that he wasn’t going to guess her age through that bit of calculation, because her college career had been atypical.

“Well, you’re younger than me,” both remember him saying. And it turned out he was right, to her surprise.

But when he asked for her number, she balked. She wasn’t inexperienced in the ways of relationships, but she had never been out with someone she had just met. Everyone she had dated previously had been someone she had known through friends or school or work.

“I didn’t give my number out much, really, ever,” she said.

Dr. Ogunkoya was disappointed.

“It’s the kiss of death,” he said. “I was kind of a little down because I didn’t think I was going to hear from her again.”

But minutes after leaving the party that night, Ms. Pedro texted him, and he was thrilled to have her number after all. Two days later, he asked her to meet him after he had been to a Yankees game for his father’s birthday, and the couple ate and drank a bit, and as they were parting, he asked her to wait while he went to get his car in the pouring rain.

“All the bouncers came to watch and said, ‘That’s a good guy,’ ” Ms. Pedro said. She thought so, too, but was so nervous on the way home that, she said, “I swear I was having a panic attack.”

He kissed her and, as she retells it: “You’d think I was 12. On my own, I have no clue what my plan would have been for progression.” NINA REYES